Cyborg Manifesto...

The article, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, by Donna Haraway focuses on both men and women being both a machine and human as cyborgs. It is a very interesting article but a bit complex in the description of how cyborgs function in modern society. There were key points in the article that resonated with me. For example, the portion in the article that explained that the “cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family” (385) was very odd to me. I began to inquire if Haraway characterized cyborgs that way in order to obstruct the traditional family and women’s stereotypical desire of having a family. Haraway also discussed the cyborgs’ inability to become reverent. I wanted to know if Haraway may have been alluding that cyborgs are not religious. Haraway also described the cyborgs as illegitimate offspring of patriarchal capitalism and therefore had the desire to rebel against their parents. I believe Haraway wrote the Cyborg manifesto in order to create a playing field where the world is void of gender and sex. Therefore, roles will not be assumed but created by each cyborg. Haraway also discusses technology’s and communication’s effect on cyborgs and societies in general. Technological communication as Haraway predicted will control and regulate humans and cyborgs. Stress was also mentioned and its effect on cyborgs and women was explained in the article. Women ultimately will use writing as their tools as cyborgs. Throughout the article, I was sometimes confused as to whether she was talking about cyborgs or humans.

In the article, “Making Gender Visible in the Pursuit of Nature’s Secrets”, Evelyn Fox Keller explains that feminist theory is used as a tool of power to reconstruct the established thoughts and facts of gender and sex. The problems of feminist theory that Keller lists are that people’s perceptions and responses of images of a man and a woman will vary. Also that people’s responses will not always be consistent. People waver on our definition on what is male and what is female.
Keller explains that secrets in the science field were created by male scientists of biology, physics, and other science fields. A woman, Rosalind Franklin was on the verge of discovering DNA with Chargaff however Chargaff and another man discovered it. Keller seems to be describing that the male dominated field of molecular biology also reigned over the scientific biology. Behind scientific texts lies an author. Keller describes how scientists use their work as “one-way glass” which causes others to reflect instead of them. I did not gain the general idea of While reading Keller’s article, I was confused as to whether women were needed to reveal secrets or men were concealing information.